Intra-city public transport can turn out to be next hotbed for COVID-19

The current state of the intra-city public transport in Karachi may adversely affect efforts to contain COVID-19 in the city as buses crammed full of sitting and standing passengers remind one of the ill-managed quarantine facility in Balochistan’s city of Taftan that allegedly proved to be the crucible of the emergency situation being currently faced by the country.

With the city being devoid of a proper transport system, passengers, many of whom have to travel out of necessity because of job or other reasons, continue to swarm public buses where there is no chance of adhering to the notion of social distancing. Moreover, transporters have also failed to observe any precautionary measure to ward off coronavirus.

Speaking to The News, Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) Executive Director Dr Seemin Jamali said passengers must sit at a distance of at least three feet in public buses.

Pakistan Medical Association’s Dr Qaiser Sajjad said the public transport can be a “very very big source of coronavirus spread”, whereas, Karachi Transport Ittehad (KTI) Joint Secretary Muhammad Ilyas deplored the fact that the transporters do not have means to observe preventive measures.

Traffic DIG Javed Mehar told The News that the department was making all out efforts to make sure that the buses were not overloaded. Not only the buses are overcrowded, Qingqi rickshaws drivers also continue to cram multiple passengers into their vehicles. Meanwhile, many rickshaw drivers, given their exclusive vehicle service, have started charging exorbitant rates.

The Sindh transport department has already shut down the inter-city public transport service in the province for 15 days from March 19, Thursday, onwards as part of the precautionary steps to slow down the transmission of the ominous pandemic in the province.

Regional Transport Authority (RTA) Secretary Nazeer Hussain shared with The News that they had already held a meeting with the KTI in which they conveyed to them the measures transporters were supposed to adopt, in which the foremost was to avoid overloading. The traffic DIG, Hussain said, has also been tasked with ensuring that no public buses ply overloaded.

Meanwhile, according to a notification issued by the Sindh transport department, transporters are required to arrange hand sanitisers at bus stops, bus stands and inside buses. The volume of traffic, according to DIG Mehar, has already been reduced in the city and it is not being observed that passengers are travelling on the roofs of public buses.

“We will strictly make sure that passengers sit seat by seat in public buses,” he assured and added that the bus owners have already been asked to take precautionary measures.

However, no preventive measures seem to have been adopted by the intra-city transporters. Ilyas said that only 10 per cent of the existing public transport is functional in the city as most of the transporters have already left the city. “We simply don’t have the means to adopt measures to prevent the virus the way government wants,” he said.

Risking their health

On Friday evening at around 5:30pm, Sultan, the conductor of a public bus G-7 that travels from Saddar to Saadi Town through Safoora Goth, makes sure that his bus is cram full of passengers.

At Nipa he continues to hit his hand at the back of his bus and yells “Safoora, Safoora”. “We have already lost 30 per cent of our passengers. We need passengers to ply our buses,” he said. When asked if he was taking any precautionary measures, he responded that the only step they were taking was cleaning their buses with brooms at night.

Meanwhile, passengers jostled for entry inside public buses at the Nipa bus stop. “The number of buses has already drastically reduced in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. We have to make our way to home,” said Safeer who works as a plumber in Gulshan-e-Iqbal. “No public transport is safe, be it Qingqi or a public bus.”

It was not only Safeer who was risking his life by travelling in a public transport in the time of coronavirus. Shahida, who works as a nurse in a small hospital near Nipa, was also one such person. She was returning to her home near Safoora in the G-7 bus. “I cannot waste my money on ride-hailing apps or on a rickshaw. A public bus or a Qingqi takes me home in no more than Rs20,” she said.

To this, Dr Sajjad said the government in an ideal situation must provide separate transport to paramedical staff in the city to control the spread of the virus. “The inter-city transport can act as a coronavirus nursery,” he said and added that it would definitely spread the virus, if something is not done about it immediately.

Nurses and paramedical staff, he said, should take extra precautions while travelling as they have to deal with the patients. He added that in public buses, one infected passenger could infect four others, who in turn can infect four more.

“The driver and especially conductor shouldn’t be ill as he directly collects fare from passengers and can be a source of infection,” he said and advised that private parties can be brought in to run buses, if there’s an extreme dearth of public transport.

Meanwhile, Dr Seemin insisted on keeping a three-foot distance between passengers in any bus. After every trip, she said, the bus should be properly washed with bleach. All iron rods and seats should be cleaned, she said. As for the passengers, she advised them to use the public transport only if there was an extreme need. “After using the bus, one must immediately wash his or her hands,” she said.